Yesterday I became disproportionately upset about something superimposed onto other things and began to feel that sensation that is a frantic, skin-electrifying mix of despair and self-pity and rage that sucks me into myself like a black hole at the core of my being inhaling me into it and causing me to feel that the only way to escape is to expand, to take that knife and puncture myself so as to breathe some of the pressure out of me, and perhaps even simply to destroy myself.
But knowing that the last time I succumbed to my survival methods I experienced hell on earth, I decided instead to go to the beach. The beach is a decent antidote for that blood-boiling poison I described. The sound of the waves breathing, the sand under my feet, the wideness of the ocean – it reminds me that I am still in it. I am still in the world despite the enormity of the internal, imploding whirlwind at my core.
I was 100% sure that no matter how cold the water was, I was going to go swimming in it. I did not have a bathing suit, only my dress and my fur coat, but I did not care. But then I realized that nobody else was in the water and perhaps this meant it was polluted or filled with sharks. Plus the sunset was beautiful on its own and the sand under my feet felt incredible as I listened to Efterklang on my iPod, so instead I sat down near the shore and simply breathed.
The clouds, as the sun approached the water, seemed to mimic the flying birds over the ocean. Wispy and whimsically winged, like white seagulls flapping and soaring and dancing in the sky. I thought, this must be the universe appreciating itself, imitating itself amusedly.
I realized as I stared at the view that no photographer, however skilled, could capture it precisely as I saw it. The ocean was of a color that cannot be reproduced by cameras – a combination of both purple and silver and black and blue.
I imagined to myself a little boy frantically trying to cover himself with sand. Sitting on the shore like me – grabbing fistfuls of damp sand and dropping it carefully but insistently onto his skin, and patting it down – but gravity keeps pulling it off of him in the places where it is not perfectly balanced by flesh and bone. He is trying, with all of his might, seemingly in vain, to create for himself a prison of sand.
And somehow, by some miracle, he defies gravity. He finds a way to cover himself from head to toe in damp beach sand from the shore, and to walk around in this shield.
And then he spends the rest of his life having forgotten why he ever built it, and trying to get it off.
An endless cyclical struggle; the exploding and collapsing of the world.
